Time for a 2010 blog update as we are already half way through January, my least favourite month of the year, and probably lots of other people's least favourite too. Having missed going home last weekend because of working at The France Show in Earls Court, in London I was really looking forward to getting home this weekend. As it turned out I spent most of Saturday tring and failing to unblock the sewage pipe from 3 of our toilets, the other three in our B&B appear to be working normally.
On Friday evening on the way home I popped in to Leroy Merlin to buy some rods to hopefully clear the blockage from the sewage pipe, however on Saturday morning when I pushed 10m of rod into the pipe I did not hit any obstructions, so what to do next? I went to Leroy Merlin again and bought another 10m of rods. Having attached this to the end of the first 10m the second went all the way into the pipe, so now I have 20m of rod in the pipe and still no resistance, so no sign of the blockage. I then tried to use my high pressure jet
washer with the correct pipe clearing attachment, but that just stopped working after about 30 seconds. Time to give up and get the professionals in, this is no simple blockage and my DIY equipment was not making any impression on the blockage after 5 hours of messing about. So Franca has the unenviable task of finding the French equivelent of Dyno Rod to sort this one out. One could say that spending 5 hours in close proximity to the contents of out sewerage pipe was also an unenviable task, though
trying to explain all this in French will test even Franca's excellent grasp of the language, so I think she is going to enlist the help of a neighbour. As one of our other neighbours said it is lucky this did not happen in high season.
The net result was a wasted Saturday, nearly €100.00 spent and the pipe is still blocked, my high pressure washer is broken and to make matters worse when I pulled out the 20m of rods I actually only got 19m back! so to say I was not a happy camper was probably an understatement, though a hot bath and a beer later and I was a bit happier.
What is running through my mind at the moment is if this blockage cannot be cleared we are going to have one hell of a problem to get sorted out quickly as B&B rooms are unusable at the moment, worst case scenario could be we have to dig up a number of floors to find the blockage or even install a totally new waste pipe, hopefully it will not come to that. Watch this space for the next smelly installment...
On a lighter note Sunday saw the arrival of our first guests of 2010, so there was lots of cleaning and tidying to be done as we had let things slip a bit since the last guests departed before Christmas.
Fleur was obviously pleased to see me when I got home on Friday evening, though less than pleased that I spent most of Saturday with my head down a sewer pipe, so after my bath & beer we made cup cakes together, and I must say that they were very nice, so nice that Franca said that we should make some for Fleur's class at school, so as well as preparing for the arrival of our guests we had to run off a batch of 24 cup cakes, complete with marzipan decoration. I have to say that Fleur is getting so good at making cakes now that I'm only needed to check quantities of ingredients are correct and supply the muscle to cream the ingredients when Fleur's arm get tired.
1 comment:
These lovely guests/friends were coming here now for the 3rd time!
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